


Virgil Tracy: All Fall Down

by ThreadbareT



Category: Thunderbirds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:07:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23249719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThreadbareT/pseuds/ThreadbareT
Summary: Thunderbird Two responds to an emergency beacon at a remote Antarctic research station.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Virgil Tracy: All Fall Down

“What kept you?” Scott asks, circling at high altitude.  
“Physics,” I remind him, with only a little hint of annoyance behind my tone. Don’t get me wrong, I like a little snark, just as much as the next man, but… there’s a time and a place, and this isn’t it. “You can’t get down there?”  
“Not without being slammed into a mountain. I thought it might improve Two’s looks. Worst case scenario, right?”  
“Boys,” Dad growls over the comms.  
“It’s okay,” I say, beginning my descent into the maelstrom of win and snow. “Scott knows that being a fast pilot isn’t always as useful as being a good pilot. He knows his limitation.”  
Yeah, so… now still wasn’t time. He started it. Shut up.  
I set down as close as I can to the research station as I can, but between the minerals in the walls of the valley, and the blizzard my instruments have a devil of a time working out where the floor is, so I have to land a distance away, on more certain footing.  
Prometheus Station is a geological survey station, set in a valley of the Transantarctic Mountains, studying the layers of rock freshly revealed by the retreating glaciers, with drones drilling for new samples in caves and strata, literally frozen in time since before man evolved.   
I’m no expert. I’ve become reasonably well read on the Station during my flight. It’s the   
It’s an ugly assortment of prefabricated buildings connected by plastic tunnels. The helicopter has stood idle so long that icicles hang from the rotors.  
The lights all glow bright, and the beacons flash, but from the outside, everything is still and quiet.  
I follow the navigation data in my visor to the airlock and step cycle my way through into the loading bay.  
“Keep your visor on,” Scott informs me over the comms.  
“Are you sure?” I ask, with a scoff. “You think maybe I shouldn’t lick anything?”  
The loading bay is quiet. The three tracked Mobiles are in their bays, attached to charging harnesses. One has the loading ramp down.  
Interesting.  
I walk over and take a look. “Are you seeing this?”  
The mobile has been packed with sleeping bags, ration packs, bottles of water, duvets. There are some bags of personal luggage too.  
“Somebody wanted to get away from…” Scott trails off. “Something.”  
I spot the picture frame on the dashboard of the mobile, and give it a tap. A mousy, pretty older woman smiles out at me, getting younger as I scroll through the images. She is in a modest apartment, in one of the crowded post-war towers, always surrounded by family, probably close family, the same brothers, sister, mother, and grandma, all cosy and huddled close. The fashions change, the city changes, but the apartment is always home.  
I blink open a tab in my visor, and find her face in the station roster. Doctor Annabelle Kim.  
“She wasn’t running.” I can’t tell you why I’m so sure, but… the girl squashed in that huddle of family, and the woman she grew into, isn’t somebody who runs. “This is something else?”  
“Are you sure?” Scott asks.  
I look around. “There’s only food and water for a few days, and the range of this thing is a few hundred miles. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t running.” I open a rucksack on the passenger seat. There are syringes, and medication. “Antivirals. Antifungals. Antibiotics. What was she trying to treat?”  
“Everything?” Scott suggests. “I’m into their comms relay.”  
“Where is everybody?” I tap my wrist console.  
A map of the facility floats in the air. Comms blips show half the crew clustered in the medical bay, and half in their personal rooms.  
Medical Bay is closer.  
I walk through the tunnels, and hear echoes from the other buildings. Bangs. Crashes. The echoes make them hard to place. They could be from the medical bay… or they could be from… anywhere.  
I weigh my options, and decide not to go on a wild goose chase, until I’ve checked on the medical bay. I move on.  
The doors of the medical bay open, and reveal a barricade, of desks and supply crates.  
“Huh.” Scott’s voice suggests a pinched brow.  
“I know,” I say, stepping back and considering the crates. “Weird.”  
I squeeze between the doors and the crates, slither up and over, and drop down into the medical bay.  
Nine beds are occupied. All of them were sealed closed, and the emergency cryo-pods engaged. The glass shells frosted over. It was the same tech you find in space travel, for people on their way out to asteroid mines. When travel time is going to be in months, not days. You get flash frozen in a deep sleep, and preserved. The idea is that if you suffer a condition beyond the abilities of the med bay to deal with, you are kept in a sleep until you can be transported to Antarctic City, or one of the larger bases.  
I consider the nine. The cryo-pods were all activated within minutes of the emergency beacon activating. All of them were registering healthy adults within. “Huh.”  
“Think we should wake them?” Scott asks.  
“What if they have a virus we can’t detect?”  
“Yeah.” Scott thinks a moment.  
“Can you check the security logs?”  
“I’m trying!” He protests. “It’s… gone. I think maybe something wrecked the equipment.”  
“Okay,” I say, with a sigh. “Maybe one of the people hunkered in their room knows. Maybe Doctor Kim. The rest of the medical staff are in cryo, so…”  
“Yeah,” Scott grumbles.  
The further I walk into the base, the less I like it. There are blast marks on the wall from small arms, and signs of a brawl. Broken window, overturned tables. Somebody had put a fire-axe into one of the computer servers.  
The banging and crashing noises got louder as I got closer to the crew cabins.  
Something hammers and claws from behind some of the doors.  
“Scott…”  
“Yeah?” He asks.  
“Learn to be a better pilot so you can land first next time.” I find the Doctor’s cabin, and knock on the door. “Doctor Kim? Annabelle?”  
Something growls and snarls within.  
I open the door.  
Kim lunges from her bed, howling like an animal, her eyes wild, her pale fatigues stained in sweat, spittle around her lips. A chain leash holds fast, and stops her taking a step. She gags and retreats onto her bed, hunched up, watching me.  
“Argh!” Scott snaps.  
“Yep,” I agree.  
“What was that?”  
“I’m pretty sure that’s what the people in cryo were hiding from,” I say, as I edge around the room, to the desk at the far side of the room. “She has a personal console, not linked to the system. Maybe she has some useful information about what happened.”  
I tap open her computer, and settle in to read the good doctor’s files. Again, I’m not an expert, but I like to think I’m a pretty quick study. I read quickly and… “Okay Scott, this is the simple version as best I see it. Three of the crewmen, three of the guys in their room, were recovering a driller drone, and came back with some kind of sickness. It made them angry, it made them…”  
“Don’t say the Z word!”  
“No. It made them behave odd.” I drum my fingers. “They acted odder. One of them managed to bite Annabelle and they broke free of the med bay. Luckily the crew trapped the infected in their room. Annabelle was worried she was infected, and her plan was… brave. She wanted to drive out and isolate herself as she tried to work out what was infecting her, but…They found an injured crewman, and had to abandon that plan to help him. Then stuff moved too fast for her to do much else but lock herself in quarantine, as the others hid in cryo, but she was close, so close, to working this out.”  
“So what do we do?” Scott asks.  
“We?”  
“I’m giving moral support,” he assures me.  
I think a moment. Something rings a bell. “I know this… It isn’t a medical thing, but I read this.”  
Scott doesn’t say anything, but I can just feel he does.  
“I have… the thing in South Africa, the wild bee swarms… There was a parasitic worm in their heads that changed their behaviour… And there’s this wasp that infects other insects…” I grab the medical scanner from the bench, change the settings, and scan one Annabelle’s blood sample. It pings back a reading. I download some textbooks, and learn how to treat parasites.  
It takes time to go back to the mobile, and find the right medication, then back to Annabelle’s room. It takes a lot less time for her come back to reality, and for her eyes to focus.  
She doesn’t speak for a long while. She sips water from a bottle and puts her fingers to icon on my sash, tracing the letters.  
I let her rest as I take the treatment to the rest of her colleagues. They aren’t chained down, and they aren’t exactly happy to get inoculated.  
“How bad was I?” Annabelle asks, an hour later, as every climbs aboard the mobiles.  
“Not too bad,” I say, “all things considered. And… you get the coolest lift back to a hospital.”  
“Which one is yours?” She asks.  
I grin. “The best one, of course,” I say, because Scott is listening, and he knows it’s true.


End file.
